[sarcasm]
We live in funny times. You have to justify why you donīt have or want internet at home (my favourite assumption so far - only a bit exaggerated: "hey, you donīt have internet. But why should someone care about you, in any case you must be too poor to buy the game). And the most funny thing, playing offline becomes a feature.

10 - 15 years ago, playing online was a feature of games, now after almost every big title has this feature, the game companies invented a new feature to be sold to the customer: "the ability to still play offline"
[/sarcasm]

Now we have only one problem, none of the poor guys without access to the net (but money for civ5) can complain here, so the lack of them in this discussion shouldnīt be that big wonder for everybody. (and without market survey i will make no guess how many they are)

Sorry, but Ori has shown that this isn't true. Even if you play in offline mode with no internet connection it will pester you to connect.

That is not what Ori said - he said it pestered him for permission to get through his firewall (because he hadn't given it the permission to do so).

In my experience, with no active internet connection and steam in offline mode. Steam doesn't "pester" me at all.

__________________
I play King Level, Huge Maps, Marathon Speed

"We are creatures of the twilight. But it is out of our race and lineage that minds will spring, that will reach back to us in our littleness to know us better than we know ourselves, and that will reach forward fearlessly to comprehend this future that defeats our eyes." -- H. G. Wells, 1902

i have a friend who is stationed over in Iraq and internet connection even dial up is spotty at best so on a good day he can connect to the internet long enough to install a game but why should he have to put up with this BS in the first place

__________________BillieHoliday
"A good plan violently executed now is better than a perfect plan executed next week."
-George S. Patton

i have a friend who is stationed over in Iraq and internet connection even dial up is spotty at best so on a good day he can connect to the internet long enough to install a game but why should he have to put up with this BS in the first place

Do you mean install or activate? Because activating a game requires extremely little internet access. No more than viewing a webpage - if you can use the dial up access at all then it should be enough to activate.

You only need to have access ONCE to activate the game. After that you do not need to have internet access to play--you can play in offline mode.

In installed Civ4 via steam and I can tell you that it's my favorite game to play when I'm on an airplane...

This is patently false, at least for the majority of "internet activation" games, and probably true for CiV, as they all are requiring a large (debate as to how large) update on registration, and ALL patches and updates are required to be done from the gaming computer. I am waiting for definite word on this from Greg or Elizabeth, but all (to my knowledge)other "internet activation" games are this way.
Regardless, this was a reply to the ludicrous comment about those without dedicated 24/7 internet.
Civ4 is not inherently tied to any internet registration or server, in fact they recently took even cd check out.

Do you mean install or activate? Because activating a game requires extremely little internet access. No more than viewing a webpage - if you can use the dial up access at all then it should be enough to activate.

To be fair, this is somewhat understating the situation...

What you say is true if the customer has physical media to install from and activation is all that is required. However, it is not unusual for products to have sizable patches available on day 0 and if the product being installed has any sort of patch available then Steam will insist on installing that patch before first use.

Even a modest size patch, 50Mb say, will be, at the very least, a big inconvenience to somebody with only a dial-up connection. Of course this also doesn't take into account any necessary updates to the Steam Client.

Not as important but also worth highlighting is the fact that somebody with dial-up internet is effectively denied the ability to play as Babylon because buying and downloading the deluxe edition is not an option for them.

__________________
The 4Xs...Explore...Expand...Exploit...Ex-ter-min-ate!

However, it is not unusual for products to have sizable patches available on day 0 and if the product being installed has any sort of patch available then Steam will insist on installing that patch before first use.

Which is better than the alternative: You install a buggy, low quality game on day 0 and have a horrible experience. After suffering in agony and banging your head in frustration you notice the sizable patch on the developer's website and start the same lengthy download that Steam would have forced, and then waste time figuring out how to apply the patch.

Personally I feel Steam is doing me a service in this case, I would much rather wait for the update and have a quality experience then wind up in the hospital bleeding from the forehead from having banged my head against the wall in frustration over game bugs.

If you insist on buying a DVD and you only have a dial-up connection there is really NO solution for you other than to wait until the 2nd batch of DVD's ship and you can get a copy of the game that does not require a big download, no matter whether it be through steam or manually downloaded off a website.

and those that do are of no consequence......yep, thats right.......who cares....they aren't you, are they....so they can just be ignored.
I wonder...just how many of us that play civ this group covers? Oh well, it seems we are invisible so we will never know.

and those that do are of no consequence......yep, thats right.......who cares....they aren't you, are they....so they can just be ignored.
I wonder...just how many of us that play civ this group covers? Oh well, it seems we are invisible so we will never know.

I bet if you surveyed people who pay for games you would find that very few of them are dialup users, meanwhile, I bet you will find an enormous number of people who randomly browse the steam store and impluse buy anything that looks fun.